An exercise in mindfulness

Monthly Archives: August 2017

First morning at Chautauqua, Judy Wolfe, the female partner of the Glassman/Wolfe in-house Road Scholar team, threw out the question, Are the media biased? Before anyone could respond, she said, Depends on who you ask.

I am grateful to distill and share some of my learning about how to discriminate truth from falsehood in the news from my Road Scholar’s week at Chautauqua. According to President Trump, all news is biased and must be called out except those outlets that adhere to his point of view. Despite being the number one target of Trump’s organized campaign to discredit mainstream press, the news media is alive and well.

Marty Baron, the executive editor of the Washington Post and the former Boston Globe editor highlighted in the movie Spotlight and the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, is hopeful. It’s a great time to be a journalist, he said. His logic, clear and specific made sense. For a long time, people have taken journalism for granted…in the last year or so…maybe people have begun to understand that you shouldn’t take quality journalism for granted.

I could not agree more. In fact, the whole premise of 52 seniors coming together to dig into media and the news was all about honoring and embracing what the 4th estate presently faces in the workings of our democracy.

Jay Rosen, the New York University professor of journalism and a self-described “loyal critic of the press,” held back no punches. There is an organized campaign to discredit the mainstream press in this country…And it’s working, he said. When journalists get to their desk in the morning, between 20% & 30% of the public, the electorate is already lost to them before they even log in.

How dispiriting is that, especially when you consider the dangers inherent in a black out of investigative journalistic endeavors imbedded in fact checking and accountability.

According to Baron, quality journalism depends on accountability. The purpose is to find out what’s really going on…particularly when it involves wrongdoing, he said. Baron agreed with Rosen’s assessment that Trump is engaged in an effort to try to intimidate the press and maybe do more. He emphasized the Post’s priority in protecting the confidentiality of its sources through the use of encrypted online communication and entirely offline communication when possible.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, FactCheck.org co-founder, introduced the dangers of viral deception, a term she coined about the usage of misleading or flat-out false narratives. Passed from person to person and friend to friend…misleading facts, narratives, rise in credibility as more and more people share them online. And with each additional click, public discourse is degraded just a little more.

She warned, Deception is problematic because it can mobilize national action…mislead the electorate… invite non-responsive policy, impugn character, even endanger lives.

The good news is that we are learning how to manage our tendency as human beings to automatically accept and spread content we agree with…Familiarity equals perceived accuracy. (WRONG!)

I was dismayed to learn that a quarter of US adults have shared fake news and the relevant research reveals that misinformation tends to persist even in face of debunking.

There is genius behind FactCheck.org as a possible antidote in that FactCheck.org deals with presenting long-form factual details rather than conclusions. I’m grateful to learn that long-form accounts which require the reader to follow a sequence of facts (upon which to reflect) can have a salient effect on short-order and untrue conclusions.

In brief, the mindfulness payoff in taking time to read, reflect and digest the detail accounting of events can and will keep facts front and center.

As I write this, I am grateful to be anticipating and preparing for a week of learning, walking and socializing at Road Scholar’s Chautauqua Experience in Summer. This is Marv’s and my 4th summer!

The Theme of the Week: Media and the News: Ethics in the Digital Age. I cannot believe the timeliness of the topic. When we chose our date almost a year ago, we had no idea that Trump would be elected or that issues such as real or fake news, and ethical dilemmas in both the media and news would be so pertinent.

Every Chautauqua Road Scholar event has a resident scholar who provides a daily lecture on background and current information in preparation for the Amphitheater public lecture series. During two of our prior visits to Chautauqua, Marc Glassman, a radio and print journalist, and his wife, Judy Wolfe, a creative arts consultant, provided exceptional content through lecture and video examples. At luncheon and dinner, the couple circulated among our various tables to continue the conversation.

Gratitude for their friendship and a rich and varied learning experience influenced our choice for this summer. Who could predict the serendipitous possibility last July, over lunch, when we decided to join Marc and Judy for their gig in August, 2017!

Yes, I am up to my eyeballs in news, fake and real, trying to discern, stay the course, to be informed. I need a “chill” vacation and yet I need to understand more about how the news and media are influencing the day-to-day behavior worldwide. Just this week, with Trump’s impulsive shoot-from-the-hip Fire and Fury response to a news reporter, we are looking at nuclear warfare; the possibility of another Korean war outbreak is front and center.

How to manage what seems real from what is real? How to manage multiple perspectives? Hopefully, I will come away more able to discern, assess and distinguish what has heft and meaning from what is fear mongering.

Here’s the lineup:

Monday: Jeff Rosen, liberal media critic, writer, professor of journalism at New York University. He authors the PressThink blog on “the fate of the press in a digital era and the challenges in rethinking what journalism is today.”

Tuesday— Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of communication and the director of The Annenberg Public Policy Center. She runs Fact Check, an organization devoted to examining the factual accuracy of U.S. political advertisements.

Wednesday— Arzu Geybullayeva, columnist and journalist. She has been a co-director of the Imagine Center for Conflict Transformation since 2011, an organization that fosters relations between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

I’m pleased with the distribution of men and women and their varied expertise. I’ll be taking notes with the intention to distill and share in future Gratitude is as Gratitude Does blogs. In the meantime, be mindful of options that can bring gratitude.